In this completely revised and considerably expanded new edition, Steven Connor considers the recent work of the most influential postmodern theorists, including Lyotard and Jameson, and offers accounts both of the work of newly emerging theorists and new areas of postmodernist culture which have developed over the last decade, especially in law, music, dance, spatial theory, ethnography, ecology, and the new technologies.
Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Director of the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). Among his many books are explorations of aspects of the cultural history of the senses, including Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (2000), The Book of Skin (2004), and Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (2014). His most recent books are Dream Machines (2017), The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowledge (2019), and Giving Way: Thoughts on Unappreciated Dispositions (2019).
Connor is a good literary critic, and there are real moments of brilliance in here. He nicely covers some area I've otherwise picked up no familiarity with like postmodern dance. Unfortunately, say 60-70% of this book is a summary of the books of others. Chapter headings like the second to last featuring the tantalizing "postmodern sublime" are often surprisingly thin on their namesake. Connor tries to illustrate everyone else's theories fall short in some way. It's a coin toss on whether I was convinced by them. Worst of all, this book includes significant meditations on the state of the humanities and university system that are laughably (I literally did laugh many times) out of date. My favorite was his triumphalist declaration of the power and bright future of English departments and how they aren't going anywhere.